"He lived like a dead tree in a graveyard."
"A Storm On The Mountain" is nominally about Aanav, a young boy who flees the portrait of a family and finds refuge on a hill where he befriends a shepherd who wears goat-skin-trousers. Still, his chaotic...
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He was sweeping the house, dusting off the leaves that rumbled their way in the night before. There was dust, or free mud, all piling up at the edge of the stiff and thready bundle of a broom, the dust throwing off tiny puffs and vanishing into itself. Once he was done inside, he began brushing the tiny veranda, beating his old cane chair, shifting and tumbling the pile of unwanted on the other side, cleaning fiercely, determined to look at the house as satisfied as he could feel.
Even though the house was old, long before Aanav had managed to buy it, it's eyes remained closed and was settled into a deep, haunting sleep for years. He had knowledge of whom the house belonged to before he was even born.
There lived an English teacher, white and cold, old and grumpy who treated his Indian servant poorly, with racial slurs and biblical words like "Bastard". It was rumored that the servant killed the old man, who gave orders by screaming "In the name of Queen Victoria, get me a cup of tea!" with snake venom in the very morning tea and ran away to never be found again. He heard that the servant (killer) hid in the town for hours before running off towards the forest. Some said he was eaten by animals. Others said he fell off the mountain.
Nevertheless, the old teacher's ghost was said to haunt the house, or at least his silence did.
This was back in the 1920s or 30s, he couldn't remember well now, for it was quiet a while ago he'd sat down listening to the young shepherd, who wore nothing but trousers of young meat, said to have the thinest secrets the hill could never even begin to echo.
He paused then, letting the broom lean onto the wooden walls, his knuckles firmly resting on his hipbones, nose huffing senseless puffs of cold, dry air. He looked down the valley for once, staring dumbly, the pupil of his eyes dilated at the tiny white buildings, with rusted yet shiny steel roofs covering them. Surrounding the village, were farmlands, where villagers perhaps grew their crops, from where he ate his bread and tea. The place remained silent, peaceful, the alcoholic scent of flowers flowing through the light wind, until a sudden vapor of bitter and rotten eggs and vegetables surfaced the air for a second or so, and he knew what it was.
Aanav turned back and saw his Butter, knees bent, tail stretched right above pointing at her own head, face up- innocently, radiating brown substance from the inside of her body.
He frowned, upset. "Stupid dog! Dirty girl! Bad!"
But after her excreta was all emptied out of her now hungry stomach, she walked towards him, her tail wagging above like a waving flag and nuzzled her nose, then face into his knees. She then leaped a little and rested her front paws on her master's stomach, her nails large and sharp- painfully digging into his skin almost cutting through. The dog stretched, her body almost double the size, and let out a squeak of a yawn and stared at him for an uncertain time, while flies already began slumbering around her waste.
